{"id":235,"date":"2019-11-07T07:40:30","date_gmt":"2019-11-07T07:40:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/populareducation.in\/loksamvad\/?post_type=article&p=235"},"modified":"2019-11-07T07:40:30","modified_gmt":"2019-11-07T07:40:30","slug":"40-government-departments-are-using-a-social-media-surveillance-tool-and-little-is-known-of-it","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"http:\/\/populareducation.in\/loksamvad\/article\/40-government-departments-are-using-a-social-media-surveillance-tool-and-little-is-known-of-it\/","title":{"rendered":"40 government departments are using a social media surveillance tool \u2013 and little is known of it"},"content":{"rendered":"The limited information publicly available on the AASMA tool suggests it can track social media profiles, devices and their locations.<\/em><\/strong>\r\n\r\nOn August 3, the Centre withdrew its proposal of creating a Social Media Communication Hub, through which it wanted to monitor the social media accounts of citizens, after the Supreme Court called the plan an attempt at creating a \u201csurveillance state\u201d. But even before this plan of the government could come under public scrutiny, several of its agencies had been using a \u201cstrategic\u201d tool that conducts mass surveillance of citizens\u2019 social media activities, show documents reviewed by Scroll.in.\r\n\r\nThe tool \u2013 Advanced Application for Social Media Analytics or AASMA \u2013 was developed by the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi, a Delhi government university, with funding from the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology around 2013-2014. Since then, its use by government agencies has grown manifold without much public scrutiny.\r\n\r\n\u201cGovernment of India has officially declared this project as STRATEGIC in nature and is closely monitoring the growth of the same,\u201d says the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology\u2019s annual report of 2016-2017. According to the report, more than 40 state and Central government departments had deployed the tool by April 2017 and another 75 had requested its installation at the time.\r\n\r\nThe report goes on to say, \u201cAASMA has been discussed at the secretary \/ minister level\u2026 Some agencies have also given formal feedback in writing that the tool is very useful to them and they are using it for their internal purposes.\u201d It, however, does not name the departments using the surveillance tool or in the process of installing it. Nor does it specify the purpose they are using it for.\r\n\r\nThe limited information about the features of AASMA in publicly available government documents suggests the tool can \u201c24X7\u201d collect and analyse \u201clive data\u201d on users from \u201cmultiple social networks\u201d including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and Google+. It can track social media profiles, their posts and networks of connections to identify \u201ctop users\u201d, conduct \u201csentiment analysis\u201d of their posts to categorise them as either \u201cpositive\u201d or \u201cnegative\u201d, according to a note by the National Police Mission on use of the tool for surveillance for police departments. It can also track users\u2019 devices and their locations and send \u201calerts\u201d to authorities depending on the \u201ccriteria\u201d set by the authorities, the note says. It adds that the police would use AASMA to \u201ctrack public views and sentiments on various social media platforms\u201d, to handle \u201csensitive issues and protests\u201d.\r\n\r\nAccording to the curriculum vitae of Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, associate professor at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi, the tool has been requested by the armed forces too.\r\n\r\n\u2018We don\u2019t know who is using it for what purpose\u2019\r\n\r\nIt is not clear from the documents if the use of AASMA is limited to security and intelligence agencies. It is also not clear what oversight these agencies have on the surveillance tool to prevent any misuse of personal data collected by it. Given that India does not yet have a law to ensure data protection or to define the process of obtaining consent from individuals before using their online data, the widespread use of a social media surveillance tool by government agencies has raised privacy concerns.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe biggest concern around use of this tool is there is no transparency,\u201d said Amber Sinha of the Centre for Internet and Society, a non-profit research organisation. Sinha added, \u201cWe don\u2019t know who is using it for what purpose. We don\u2019t know whether the government agencies are just using it to aggregate data of social media chatter or tracking profiles of past criminals or profiling each individual. If they are tracking social media activities of each individual, it would have a chilling effect on free speech.\u201d\r\n\r\nRaman Jit Singh Chima, Director of Public Policy at global digital rights non-profit Access Now, agreed. \u201cIf the government departments are collecting and analysing social media data of citizens on a mass scale, it is definitely surveillance,\u201d he said. \u201cIt does not matter if the data being monitored and processed is publicly available. After the nine-judge-bench order of the Supreme Court on privacy, it is fairly clear that even the publicly-available personal data of citizens is protected.\u201d\r\n\r\nChima said that for any kind of surveillance of data, the government needs to justify the purpose. \u201cIt has to have a process of authorisation for conducting such surveillance, oversight to ensure accountability and a mechanism to provide remedy in case any harm is caused by such surveillance to citizens,\u201d he said. \u201cUnfortunately, we don\u2019t have such a legal process in place yet.\u201d\r\n\r\nNeither the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology nor the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi, responded to Scroll.in\u2019s queries on which government departments are using the tool, for what purpose, and what kind of oversight is being exercised by them.\r\n\r\nSurveillance to influence?<\/strong>\r\n\r\nFear of misuse of social media data has increased globally over the past few months, ever since it emerged that the United Kingdom-based political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had mined the social media data of individuals, without their informed consent, to use it for political campaigning. The company is alleged to have analysed the social media posts of millions of individuals to create their psychological profiles, which it used for targeted messaging to influence voting patterns.\r\n\r\nConcerns over government surveillance of citizens\u2019 social media communication grew in India after the Union Information and Broadcasting Ministry floated a tender to create a Social Media Hub in April. Scroll.in had first reported how the government wanted to use the hub to monitor the social media accounts of individuals to gauge their opinions about government policies, create \u201c360 degree\u201d profiles of them and target them with personalised messages to alter their opinions. The ministry had to withdraw the tender after a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court challenged it on the grounds of privacy violation.\r\n\r\nEven as this plan of the government was challenged in the court, the Unique Identification Authority of India, which manages the Aadhaar database of more than one billion Indians, floated a tender to hire an agency to monitor social media conversations related to Aadhaar. It hoped to use this information to identify \u201cdetractors\u201d and \u201cinfluencers\u201d and run campaigns to \u201cneutralise\u201d negative sentiments\u201d on social media. This plan has also been challenged in the court.\r\n\r\nThese attempts of the government came to public notice as the procurement of software and services for the schemes was done through public procurement process. But AASMA is being installed at interested agencies on their request, away from the public glare. According to the Police Mission note, the tool would be provided free of cost to police departments by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.\r\n\r\n\u00a0<\/strong>Secrecy around the tool<\/strong>\r\n\r\nThe government\u2019s \u201cstrategic\u201d schemes \u2013 purportedly for intelligence gathering, law enforcement and crime prevention \u2013 are shrouded in secrecy, which it justifies for the effectiveness of the schemes. And so, there is little information available on the design, features and ongoing use of AASMA.\r\n\r\nA report in The Indian Express, published in February 2016, said the National Security Council Secretariat was planning to set up a National Media Analytics Centre, which was based on a media and social media \u201ctracking software\u201d designed by Ponnurangam Kumaraguru of the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology. According to the news report, the \u201csoftware would comb posts and comments to classify them into negative, neutral and positive categories\u201d and \u201ccome up with instant counters to plug resentment triggered by news items so that personal opinions do not snowball into public protests and threaten law and order\u201d.\r\n\r\nThe newspaper, quoting unidentified \u201csources\u201d, said, \u201cThe software would also help recall the past pattern of the writer to check the number of times he took a negative or positive stand, his background, and preferences of websites and areas of interest to judge whether they were aimed at fomenting trouble or radicalisation.\u201d There has been no information about the National Media Analytics Centre proposal in the public domain since then.\r\n\r\nThe Advanced Application for Social Media Analytics or AASMA has been developed by Kumaraguru. His curriculum vitae shows that one of the projects he has been working on since 2016, with a funding of Rs 1.69 crore from the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, is on \u201cIntegrating Open Source Intelligence from Traditional Sources and Online Social Networks for Intelligence Gathering\u201d. Kumaraguru did not respond to Scroll.in\u2019s repeated requests for a meeting or to email queries asking how he plans to ensure that the technology is not misused.\r\n\r\nThe National Police Mission\u2019s note offers a glimpse of the ways the software can be used. According to the note, the tool would be used to establish \u201cSocial Media Labs\u201d at state police departments to keep a watch on the social media activities of the public at large. \u201cThe Social Media Labs will provide public sentiment analysis, identify behavioural pattern, influences and advocates, track the change and increase in chatter and generate alerts in real time for police to take suitable action,\u201d says the note. \u201cThe advanced social media monitoring tools [AASMA] shall help in gauging and analysing the public media and sentiment, draw up predictive analysis of projected events and provide indicators to police regarding the size and seriousness of these public emotions.\u201d\r\n\r\nPrakash Singh, who was formerly director general of the Border Security Force and Director General of Police in Uttar Pradesh and Assam, questioned the significance of mass surveillance of social media by law enforcing agencies. \u201cThe law enforcement agencies are authorised to intercept personal messages of a person they suspect. There is a process for such authorisation and this kind of targeted surveillance is justified. But I can\u2019t see a reason why they should conduct mass surveillance of social media users to gauge public sentiments,\u201d he said. Singh ended with a question. \u201cIt can have some justification in a totalitarian state where things happen under the radar but, in a democracy like India, where public sentiments are out in open, why do you need to create such data labs?\u201d","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The limited information publicly available on the AASMA tool suggests it can track social media profiles, devices and their locations. On August 3, the Centre withdrew its proposal of creating a Social Media Communication Hub, through which it wanted to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"issuem_issue":[9],"class_list":["post-235","article","type-article","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","issuem_issue-september-2019","entry","no-media"],"yoast_head":"\n40 government departments are using a social media surveillance tool \u2013 and little is known of it - Lok Samvad<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/populareducation.in\/loksamvad\/article\/40-government-departments-are-using-a-social-media-surveillance-tool-and-little-is-known-of-it\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"40 government departments are using a social media surveillance tool \u2013 and little is known of it - Lok Samvad\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The limited information publicly available on the AASMA tool suggests it can track social media profiles, devices and their locations. 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